A horse race’s healing power

Palos Verdes Stakes will help trainer Peter Miller regain sense of normality after fire.

Peter Miller stood on the stage at Gulfstream Park accepting an honor on behalf of his first Eclipse Award winner. It was a moment of a lifetime in a career that includes nine training titles and more than $40 million in purses. But he was nervous and it wasn’t over the speech he was giving.

“I just rushed through my speech, didn’t even pull out my notes,” Miller said. “I was more worried about the other speech I had to give.”

The end of 2017 for Miller contained the greatest high and an unfathomable low, all over the course of 34 days. It started when the 51-year-old Encinitas resident won two Breeders’ Cup races, the Turf Sprint with Stormy Liberal and the Sprint with Roy H. Miller. He had never won a Breeders’ Cup race and then to win two in one day seemed unbelievable.

Then on Dec. 7, he got a call that the San Luis Rey Downs training center, where he had 77 horses, had been set ablaze by the Lilac fire. He rushed there from Los Alamitos only to be forced to wait outside for what seemed like an interminable amount of time before he could learn the fate of his horses. Five from his stable perished.

On Eclipse Awards night, he was feeling the pressure of also accepting an honor on behalf of the first responders to the fire that killed 46 horses at the facility.

“It was very emotional for me,” Miller said. “It was a difficult speech to give, but I’m glad I did it. I really wanted to convey what all the horsemen were feeling. I was representing everyone.”

Saturday is another step in Miller’s attempt to bring normality back to his life. Roy H, his Eclipse Award winner, is running in the Grade 2 $200,000 Palos Verdes Stakes at Santa Anita.

“It’s been a rough couple months, to say the least,” Miller said. “We’re all still getting over it. But horse people are resilient; you have to be because there is so much disappointment in this industry. But this was much more than usual.”

Miller was at Los Alamitos when he got the call from his assistant trainer Jehobany Alvarez.

“He said the fire was on the property,” Miller said. “I said, ‘You’re kidding. What do you mean?’ He said again the fire was on the property. I told him he had to set the horses loose.”

What followed was chaos as horses, some on fire, many in distress, frantically ran in random directions to a fate that was uncertain.

“They were not letting anyone in for an hour,” Miller said. “They said it was too dangerous. Finally, I found one police officer who seemed to understand we needed to get the vans in.”

When he got to the scene what he saw was beyond horrific.

“It was worse than I imagined,” Miller said. “It was a war zone.”

Miller said it took two to three weeks to shake off the shock.

“I’m not alone in there was a lot of us with PTSD,” Miller said. “There are things that I saw that I will never be able to erase from my mind.”

Saturday will be part of the healing process for those affected by the fire.

“It could have been a lot worse,” said Gary Hartunian, a co-owner of Roy H, who also has a stake in Stormy Liberal and owned California Diamond as well as many other horses.

“We’ve got to have an attitude to keep going. There are still a lot of horses that didn’t perish that are all banged up and bruised. Pete gets a little hyped up, so we’ve got to calm him down. In the end, everything is going to be just fine.”

Roy H was not at San Luis Rey, as he was stabled that time at Santa Anita, where he is the overwhelming favorite at 3-5 in the sixfurlong race.

In many ways, Roy H symbolizes the mercurial life of those in horse racing. He earned just short of $90,000 in his first two years of racing, then earned almost $1.3 million last year.

“He wasn’t doing much,” Hartunian said. “He wasn’t training well. He wasn’t geared into the program. I probably said, ‘Why don’t we just geld him?’”

That and some time off seemed to turn things around for Roy H, named for Hartunian’s grandfather.

“You never expect a horse to go from that level to an Eclipse Award winner in a year,” Miller said. The trainer also has Bobby Abu Dhabi in the five-horse race, a colt Miller hopes is “this year’s Roy H.”

As good as last year was for Miller, that one day in December makes looking forward to this year so much more appealing. “We’re well on our way to being whole again,” Miller said.